


Amaranth and Marigold

by spinninginfinityboy



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Hanahaki Disease, Hurt No Comfort, Immortality, M/M, Pining, Self-Denial, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:08:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23170708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spinninginfinityboy/pseuds/spinninginfinityboy
Summary: Jack coughs – a thick, wet sound, dragging at his lungs – and his eyes well up as a rose works its way from his throat and falls, spit-thick, to the floor. His lips trace a soundless name as he breathes in flowers.orHow a terminal illness doesn't end with death.
Relationships: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones
Comments: 4
Kudos: 96





	Amaranth and Marigold

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for those who don't know what Hanahaki disease is - there's a lot of choking/struggling to breathe/retching/spitting etc in this fic.

It’s hard to find true darkness in the soft, pulsing lights of the Torchwood hub. Equipment flickers and flutters with the electric heartbeat of the place. Jack sighs.

There’s silence, now, at least. The bulkhead closes with a grinding finality, and he’s alone. Hardly a new sensation. Jack finds that loneliness is the default state of life, in a universe so vast as this. In a life so long as his.

He coughs – a thick, wet sound, dragging at his lungs – and his eyes well up as a rose works its way from his throat and falls, spit-thick, to the floor. He wishes the damn things would curl and wither, but it sits there, fresh as spring. Its pink petals are spattered red with blood.

Jack sighs again, shuddering at the effort it takes to drag down the air. The final finger of whisky burns as he tosses it back; more than the heat of good alcohol, it claws at the thorns and lacerations in his throat, hurts in a way that brings more tears to his eyes. Or maybe that’s just an excuse.

It’s definitely an excuse, actually, because now he’s letting them spill over as he lies back on the sofa. Jack closes his eyes against the pulsing lights and the tears. It doesn’t work. His heart still pulses behind his eyes, and the tears wet his cheeks as he struggles for breath which he knows won’t come.

There’s no point in struggling. Jack thinks of the last thing anyone had said to him, the smile which accompanied it; the team, battle-scarred and bloodied, limping their separate ways, and yet there was still time for one smile.

Jack steels his nerves, and his lips trace a soundless name as he breathes in flowers.

~*~

Jack wakes with a gasp, bolt upright and coughing. His head is swimming, and his limbs feel sluggish, slow to respond to his desperate lunging. He recognizes the symptoms.

“Welcome back to the land of the living.”

He turns towards the sound and sees Owen, nursing a cup of coffee and looking about as rough as Jack feels. In truth Jack’s surprised he hadn’t opted for a more hair-of-the-dog approach. Beside him, Gwen cradles her head in her hands.

Jack opens his mouth to retort, but is stopped by the feeling of something unfamiliar, caught on his hangover-heavy tongue. It tastes sweet and stale. With one finger he carefully parts his dry lips, hooks the strange object and pulls it forward. It slips free easily.

Balanced on his finger is a single, fully-formed flower petal. If he had to guess, he’d say a rose, but it’s just that – a guess. Along with most of his memories of the previous night.

“Some party,” he muses. The petal curls in the air on its way to the waste bin. “I always did like florals.”

Gwen groans.

“God, don’t make me think of the party. I don’t want to think of anything.”

That makes Jack smile. One of the more useful side effects of functional immortality is the ease with which the milder poisons wear off. Already his head is beginning to clear.

“Coffee?” he asks Owen, walking up to join the others.

“Irish.”

“Ah. In that case, I’ll make my own.”

“No need, sir.”

Ianto smiles soft and cheerful from the main doorway, three mugs balanced in his hands. At once, Jack beams.

“Bright and breezy this morning.”

“Just on time, sir, as always.”

Jack accepts the proffered cup gratefully, the warmth of the coffee unfurling in his chest. He turns to the computer bay. Every time they take a night off, he knows from experience a disaster will be waiting come morning. No use delaying the inevitable. Gwen clutches at hers like a woman half-drowned, while Owen waves away the mug.

“Suit yourself,” mutters Ianto, and takes a swig from it himself. From the corner of his eye Jack sees him close his eyes and hum in contentment. 

A memory stirs from beneath the fog of alcohol; Ianto passing him a drink across the table in the bar the previous night. He had smiled, a broad, honest thing which quickly became a laugh as he saw Owen tragically failing to catch the attention of a woman sat at the bar.

“You have to admire a man who never gives up,” he had said, and Jack had grinned, a breath of laughter rippling the surface of his drink.

“Maybe he’d have better luck if he gave her these.”

Jack scooped a bunch of flowers from their bottle, placed in the middle of the table in a feeble attempt at decoration. They looked almost like roses in the low light. Jack offered them to Ianto with a wink.

“What d’you think? Improving my chances?”

Ianto had leaned forward, inhaled deeply. Jack had half expected the flowers to be fake, but from the satisfied hum Ianto gave he guessed he was wrong. In the low light, Jack could almost imagine Ianto blushing.

The memory slips away as quickly as it had come. Jack blinks the thought free and swallows down the tickle of a cough.

“Alright, team. We’ve got reports of some anomalous tech cropping up in the local market, and the stalls open in” - he checks his watch – “forty-seven minutes. Sober up.”

Owen and Gwen groan in unison. Tosh emerges from behind a bank of screens, looking as though she might well have slept there. And when Jack catches Ianto’s eye, well, a cough is close enough to a laugh that it could be neither at all.

~*~

There are days when Jack thinks all he does is run. Away from or towards, it doesn’t matter; his life moves at a sprint and never hits a finish line. This particular Tuesday they’re after some kind of computer project gone wrong, extraterrestrial tech cobbled into something medical by a well-meaning genius who didn’t know enough. Tosh thinks it’s some kind of cyberman technology, this time working from the inside – if it can’t get the human brain into a cyber host, then it will control the human from the cybernetic parts within. Two grandmas with pacemakers and insulin pumps have gone on a rampage already. With a bit of luck, Tosh’s deactivation codes should turn off the raging, murdering aspects without hurting anyone’s Nan.

It’s beginning to look like they’ll need quite a sizeable bit of luck. Turns out that having alien adrenaline pumping through your veins can turn spry old ladies rather menacing. 

Jack is limping, struggling for breath – a side effect of being smacked across the ribs with a walking stick, he assumes. They’re almost there, though – one final push to the medical centre to deactivate the command aerial, and they’ll be safe. Tosh and Owen are taking the lead on the technical side of things, and with Gwen driving, that leaves Jack and Ianto on distraction duty.

Of course, there’s a mild complication in that grandma has a gun.

“Oh good, Grandma has a gun,” mutters Ianto. Jack starts to laugh, before pain seizes his chest hard enough to make him double over, coughing hard. There’s an instant where it looks as though Ianto is going to stop, to check on him; but Jack waves him away, harsh maybe, but in the moment it’s not as harsh as a bullet.

A bullet.

Jack ducks, throws himself forwards on the momentum of his sudden choking and dives behind a pillarbox. The gunshot rings out before he’s even hit the ground, and somehow he catches his breath enough to roll to his feet without staggering. Enough practice, enough warfare, it’s almost second nature. At least, to him. But Ianto…

God. Ianto.

Jack twists desperately and sees Ianto crouched behind a tree, swearing. Good. Swearing is good, swearing is alive. Swearing is very much not shot in the heart.

Their eyes meet. Ianto pants.

“Fucking hell,” he says, words coming hoarse and almost hysterical. “Wouldn’t want to see what she can do with a Werther’s.”

Jack laughs. What else can he do? The breath catches in his throat as he does so and he retches, spitting a clump of something white to the dirt. Jack’s mouth tastes of elderflower. The bittersweet flavor is disconcerting, to say the least. He almost reaches to pick up whatever it is, but the sound of another shot returns him swiftly to his senses. No time. And besides, it’s probably nothing. He shakes his head.

“Let’s hope we don’t find out. On three.”

Ianto nods. Again, as always, Jack runs.

~*~

It isn’t nothing, though. Nothing is ever just nothing in this job. Jack’s known it more than long enough. He also knows from experience that denial is one hell of a drug.

So Jack ignores the gathering tightness in his chest and coughs blood and petals into a handkerchief. Drowns it all in work and sex and alcohol, and pretends he can breathe just fine. For a while, the numbing works.

Works just fine, until he stumbles on the stairs and Ianto catches him by the waist. For a heartbeat, the two stand face to face and Jack can’t help it, really, the way his eyes flicker to Ianto’s lips. Ianto smiles.

“Careful now,” he says. Jack manages to chuckle.

“Workplace safety never was my strong suit.”

“That’s what you’ve got me for, sir.”

Pain shoots through Jack’s chest, a pressure growing, expanding within him until he feels like he might collapse. He actually sways a little, and feels Ianto’s hand shift at his waist. Always there to keep him right.

“Steady, sir,” he hears Ianto murmur, allowing himself to be guided to a seat. “It’s alright. I’ve got you.”

“I’m okay,” Jack manages. “I just – tea? Something with sugar. I’ll be fine, really.”

Almost before he gets the words out, Ianto is heading away, towards the nearest kettle and what Jack knows Ianto knows is his favourite tea. As soon as the door swings closed Jack retches again, coughing and gagging on the unidentifiable mass in his throat. It shifts and unfurls and then petals are falling from his lips, handfuls of them, landing in his cupped hands. Indigo bells and small green leaves, mixed to a pulp with saliva.

He’s gone before Ianto returns, leaving only a scrap of crushed stalk behind.

~*~

Okay. So ignoring it seems out of the question.

Jack sits in his office, mulling over the little evidence he’s gathered. A bottle of bourbon sits open beside him. His computer screen blinks, taunting him with its lack of answers.

“Okay. Flowers.”

It’s something. He plugs the keyword into the database and adds ‘throat’ for good measure. Unsurprisingly, he gets one result.

Fairies.

Jack casts his mind back over the past weeks, but there’s nothing – he can’t remember even encountering a child in passing, let alone hurting one in a way that could make him a target of the fairies. Besides, they may like to play with their food but he’s never seen a case which lasted so long. It’s possible, but it’s just not likely.

He sighs, and takes a gulp of bourbon.

“Come on. Gimme something.”

No point telling the team without something to go on.

It’s a long night of futile searching. Jack reads until his eyes blur. He learns a hundred different poisons and a hundred other antidotes. There are fairies, urban legends, and a dozen more folk tales and fantasy novels featuring flowers seem to be published every day, but nothing seems to fit. The only thing which seems to match up is a strange illness, first recorded in Japan. Extremely rare, the condition affects those in unrequited – or unacknowledged – love. And Jack knows his heart is more a wanderer than most, but he can’t imagine it being more than an urban legend designed to frighten him in his sleeplessness. Jack has been in love before, and never like this.

“That settles it,” he says to nobody in particular, shutting the laptop and grabbing his coat in one smooth movement. “Definitely not telling the team.”

Cardiff bay stretches wide before him. Dawn creeps across the horizon as Jack spits flower petals into the tide, and hopes that this will all just wash away.

~*~

The thing about flowers, they’re far from as delicate as they seem. Jack never expected it to hurt so much, but it does; a constant ache, a sickly, wet cough that doesn’t go away and only seems to get worse with every cup of tea Ianto brings him. The team’s concerned glances and comforting touches turn his stomach, and every time Ianto moves towards him Jack swears he feels another bud bloom. For a time, Jack almost thinks he has it under control.

It’s only when he hears Ianto’s stilted and bitter answer to Gwen’s stupid, sleepover questioning that Jack remembers flowers can grow thorns.

Every time Jack becomes the monster they swore to oppose, he feels the thorns dig deeper into his flesh. In a strange way he’s glad. It’s what he deserve – fair punishment, the proof he is everything the others see him to be.

_Who did you last kiss, Jack? Did you ever love?_

The thorns leave no answers, only lacerations down the inside of his throat. And when the choking comes – the final, desolate choking, sick and sodden in the silence – Jack fights it in a half-night of desperation, before it wins. It was always going to win.

~*~

Jack wakes with a gasp, bolt upright and coughing.

For an instinctive instant he finds himself heaving, desperately sucking in breath. It makes him dizzy before he realises he can breathe just fine. Whatever it was which had stolen his lungs, it was gone. He laughs, echoing in the empty hub. Each breath is a resurrection, a rebirth. Nothing more than bliss, and nothing less than agony.

It lasts as long as it takes Ianto to encroach upon his personal space. The first smile shot his way, and Jack knows he’s in trouble when the irritation flares deep within his chest once more.

~*~

By the third time, Jack is well used to the sensation.

~*~

By the seventh time, he welcomes it.

~*~

Jack wouldn’t wish this life of his upon anyone. It’s become a mantra worth repeating, in the shower, the hub, the darkness between each blink as he stares, helpless, at Ianto.

It’s been agony now for months. Every breath aches like getting pummelled, every word forced and spat around a cloying mass of ever-sweet distaste, and still he can’t get rid of it. The only thing which distracts him halfway effectively enough is the dying, and even that rarely lasts more than a couple of hours. Some days Jack lies down to die as easily as anyone else might take their night’ sleep, and breathes flowers deep and steady as he sinks into nothing, hoping never to wake.

_I pray someone my soul to take._

Every day Jack wakes with a gasp, bolt upright and gasping. 

_Anyone._

And morning always comes. 

~*~

The team limp home, battle-scarred and bruised. Jack remains. Where else can he go? The worn-out sofa, the pulsing computers and ancient, far-flung technology, all wraps around him in welcome. This is the best he’s got, now. The best he’s ever going to have.

The sofa dips, tilting his elbow, once raised to take a swig of whatever his last hip flask still contained. These days it hardly matters.

“Will you be going home, sir?”

Ianto. Always bloody Ianto.

“Already am, Ianto Jones.”

The words taste bitter in Jack’s mouth, though perhaps that’s just the alcohol. He refuses to turn around but he feels the warmth of Ianto’s body, settling in against the sofa beside him. Flowers blossom in sunlight. Jack burns from the effort of keeping his face away.

He chokes, on petals, on his own denial, does it even matter any more? Nothing seems to, because Ianto is touching his hand, soft and certain.

“You’re hurt.”

“I’ve had worse.”

Nothing hurts half as bad as the effort of breathing. Jack doesn’t say this, but nor does he pull away. Ianto traces a deep gash across the back of Jack’s hand, wincing in sympathy as he sees how deep the cut is.

“What doesn’t kill you can still get infected. Nobody wants to deal with you tracking pus everywhere, or god knows what else.”

He puts a hand on Jack’s arm, tugging at him until Jack has no choice to turn and face him.

“Jack.”

The word is so soft that Jack feels it stop his breath for a moment.

“Let me.”

Jack can’t speak.

He doesn’t say a word as Ianto fetches antiseptic, gauze, tape; doesn’t even breathe if he can help it as he cleans and bandages Jack’s hand. The flowers in his chest ache. He wonders if they’ll go rotten from the effort of keeping them down. Ianto handles him with care, in this quiet, and it hurts more than any beating Jack’s ever taken.

When he finishes, Jack takes a slow, careful breath, and tries not to cough. Ianto is watching him. Every reckless impulse within him is screaming at Jack to just reach out, damn it, prove that you can be more than a _part-time shag_ – but that’s just it, really. Jack can never be that. He learnt that lesson a long time ago. Love lasts, but life doesn’t. Not for anyone else, at least. Jack goes on alone, reckless with himself and a monster with others, until the universe falls and the stars burn out.

He wonders if at the end of all things there will still be flowers to choke on.

With one more squeeze of his hand, Ianto finally stands up.

“I’d best be getting home now, I suppose.”

“Yeah.”

Jack almost surprises himself at the sound of his own voice. He tries unsuccessfully to clear his throat.

“Yeah, get some rest. Thank you, Ianto.”

“Just doing my bit, sir.”

There’s nothing Jack can say to that. Ianto smiles and Jack thinks again of kissing him, tasting blood as the thorns dig deeper.

“Goodnight, Jack.”

And then he’s gone, and Jack is left behind in the dark.

Of course, it’s hard to find true darkness in the soft, pulsing lights of the Torchwood hub. Equipment flickers and flutters with the electric heartbeat of the place. Jack sighs.

There’s silence, now, at least. The bulkhead closes with a grinding finality, and he’s alone. Hardly a new sensation. Jack finds that loneliness is the default state of life, in a universe so vast as this. In a life so long as his.

He coughs – a thick, wet sound, dragging at his lungs – and his eyes well up as a rose works its way from his throat and falls, spit-thick, to the floor. He wishes the damn things would curl and wither, but it sits there, fresh as spring. Its pink petals are spattered red with blood.

Jack sighs again, shuddering at the effort it takes to drag down the air. The final finger of whisky burns as he tosses it back; more than the heat of good alcohol, it claws at the thorns and lacerations in his throat, hurts in a way that brings more tears to his eyes. Or maybe that’s just an excuse.

It’s definitely an excuse, actually, because now he’s letting them spill over as he lies back on the sofa. Jack closes his eyes against the pulsing lights and the tears. It doesn’t work. His heart still pulses behind his eyes, and the tears wet his cheeks as he struggles for breath which he knows won’t come.

There’s no point in struggling. Jack thinks of the last thing anyone had said to him, the smile which accompanied it; the team, battle-scarred and bloodied, limping their separate ways, and yet there was still time for one smile.

Jack steels his nerves, and his lips trace a soundless name as he breathes in flowers.

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who just got back into Torchwood for the first time since he was fourteen and brought all his teen angst back with him... it's this guy


End file.
